Fearless in the Pursuit of
Immunology’s Untapped Frontiers
At Odyssey, we’re seeking to address the fundamental limitations of current autoimmune and inflammatory disease treatments. With our deep expertise in immunology and drug discovery, we are developing medicines that are designed to precisely target disease pathology with an initial emphasis on the innate immune system. These programs have the potential to yield treatments for inflammatory diseases that have large addressable patient populations and lack effective treatments.
Targeting Aberrant Inflammation
at its Source
The human immune system is a complex network of cells, tissues and organs that can be divided into two primary components: the innate immune system and adaptive immune system. The innate immune system, which forms the body’s first line of defense, is a cellular network with highly selective receptors and activators that responds to pathogenic stimuli, both directly and by producing pro-inflammatory cytokines that activate the second line of defense: the adaptive immune system.
The adaptive immune system helps eliminate pathogens and retains a memory of them for a more effective immune response to previously encountered pathogens. While these responses are necessary for normal homeostatic function and host defense, chronic pro-inflammatory signaling that remains unresolved propagates inflammatory disease and organ damage.
Current therapies for inflammatory diseases, which are largely focused on adaptive immune responses—specifically, the inhibition of cytokines—have produced meaningful benefits for patients, but also share fundamental limitations despite targeting different cytokines. Because cytokines have redundant function, blocking any one cytokine does not prevent others from activating the adaptive immune response (“cytokine redundancy”).
By focusing on upstream immune responses, our product candidates have the potential, whether as monotherapies or in combination, to address the issue of downstream cytokine redundancy and mitigate direct damage caused by the innate immune response, while having less immunosuppressive risk.
We believe our portfolio of product candidates aimed at known and novel targets in the innate immune system can produce major treatment advances for patients by expanding the aperture of how inflammatory diseases can be treated. Our strategy is focused on modulating the root of inflammatory dysregulation through highly selective targeting of key nodes in the innate immune system. Through this approach, we believe we can provide new monotherapy options for patients and physicians and enable tolerable combination treatments to further improve the breadth, depth and durability of patient responses.
Targeting with Precision
At Odyssey, our mission is to improve the lives of patients with significant unmet needs across inflammatory and autoimmune diseases. Our portfolio prioritizes programs that offer the potential to make significant advances over the standard of care for patient populations with significant unmet need within immunology.
We focus on therapeutic targets where human biology is well characterized, and clinical or translational evidence can be combined with human genetics to inform drug safety and efficacy.
We are diligent in our preclinical and clinical development path— evaluating whether there is a definable patient population that can provide unambiguous proof-of-concept or the potential to establish proof-of-mechanism in healthy volunteer studies. Patient selection or biomarker strategies are top of mind as we drive to improve the probability of success.
Utilizing Two Modalities and Proprietary Tools for Discovery and Development
Our therapeutic portfolio encompasses two therapeutic modalities: small molecules and protein therapeutics, each of which has a well prescribed development and regulatory pathway. Small molecules are preferred to address intracellular targets or provide an oral option in cases where oral administration is important for prescribers and patients. Protein therapeutics are ideal for extracellular targets particularly where multiple targets or receptors must be engaged for desired pharmacology. To support our discovery and development, we have invested in a suite of tools and capabilities, including our artificial intelligence/machine learning, natural products and covalent chemistry platforms.
Led by Experienced Drug Hunters
Odyssey is driven by a leadership team with deep experience in identifying, developing and commercializing medicines across indications and drug types. Guided by Gary D. Glick, Ph.D., founder and CEO, and Jeffrey M. Leiden, M.D., Ph.D., Chair, board of directors, our management team and board of directors have played critical roles as successful drug hunters in the discovery, development, acquisition and commercialization of multiple blockbuster therapies, as well as in founding and building biopharmaceutical companies.
To learn more about the experts driving this mission, visit our leadership page, or explore opportunities to join our team on the careers page.
The Proof of Impact Is in Our Pipeline
Our vision is supported by a robust pipeline of targets that seek to address patient populations with significant unmet need within immunology. We are exploring a wide range of targets where there is an opportunity to make significant advances over standard of care, and the patient population is sufficiently large enough to support a meaningful commercial opportunity in one or more indications.
